Deloitte & Touche’s “Forensic Corporate Counsel Survey 2010: do today’s corporate counsel hold all the cards?” asked a question of its respondents about the number of “non-legal” roles the top lawyer holds. They found that during the past five years, “the number of non-legal roles held by a GC in…
Based on 245 U.S. law departments that have participated so far in the General Counsel Metrics global benchmark survey, as well as 36 Canadian law departments, and 113 from the rest of the world, here are three ratios: 3 lawyers for every paralegal in the United States and the same…
A piece in the Harvard Business Review, Sept. 2011 at 32, describes a makeover of office space at the pharmaceutical company Lilly. The facts I extracted from the sidebar may not be representative at all, but they triggered some thoughts. One point was that employees typically spend only 35 percent…
An early post suggested a number of advantages (See my post of July 5, 2006: large law departments have scale advantages: division of labor, specialization, and investment in technology.). They have streams of similar work so those who do it become more expert (See my post of Sept. 10, 2005…
Design precedes everything created by people. “[E]verything made and used by humans has been designed, in that it has been realized from an idea or its parts have been selected from the store of existing things, modified if necessary, and assembled into a new and purportedly improved thing.” Thus grandly…
Thomas Werlen, general counsel of Swiss pharmaceutical company Novartis, leads a legal team of 700-plus that is spread across 140 jurisdictions. As he explains in the European Lawyer, June/July 2011 at 39, “The department is organised in a three-layered matrix of work areas, countries and business divisions.” That makes sense:…
Breaking itself into three pieces, the ITT spinoff underway will result in the promotion of two of its lawyers to the new top spots. As laid out in Corp. Counsel, Aug. 2011 at 32, the former ITT corporate secretary, Burt Fealing, will head the lawyers of the new company that…
With the promotion of Laura Witte to General Counsel at $108 billion Cargill, more has come out about that huge conglomerate and its legal group. According to Corp. Counsel, July 2011 at 38, the company has 131,000 workers spread across 66 countries. Of the 200 lawyers in-house, 120 of them…
Although I don’t speak Portuguese, I hope I correctly translated a post on the LinkedIn site of FDJUR, hosted by Jose Nilton Cardoso. He asked the group’s members a question along these lines. “The structure of the law department in your company might include other functions. Of the following, where…
Several of the functions that are “on the bubble” for law departments or are more typically handled outside the department have significant process elements. With contract administration, to take one, the legal counsel is a smallish part, but tracking, database entry, distribution, and calendaring are repetitive tasks. Likewise for compliance,…